"According to helium conservationists like Robert Coleman Richardson, the free market price of helium has contributed to "wasteful" usage (e.g. for helium balloons). Prices in the 2000s have been lowered by U.S. Congress' decision to sell off the country's large helium stockpile by 2015."
I'm a bit skeptical of the quoted numbers, but even if they're a magnitude off there's still plenty left to be extracted. The US alone apparently still has enough proven helium in natural gas reserves for the next 40 years of worldwide consumption, and estimated unproven reserves for the next 40.000 years:
"Diffusion of crude natural gas through special semipermeable membranes and other barriers is another method to recover and purify helium.[84] In 1996, the U.S. had proven helium reserves, in such gas well complexes, of about 147 billion standard cubic feet (4.2 billion SCM).[85] At rates of use at that time (72 million SCM per year in the U.S.; see pie chart below) this is enough helium for about 58 years of U.S. use, and less than this (perhaps 80% of the time) at world use rates, although factors in saving and processing impact effective reserve numbers. It is estimated that the resource base for yet-unproven helium in natural gas in the U.S. is 31–53 trillion SCM, about 1000 times the proven reserves."
What? No. You're completely misreading this. The situation with helium wouldn't be as dire if we were recovering it properly (which we're not, because of the economics of
boneheaded political decisions as wikipedia describes). But once those deposits run out, the nearest economically viable source of helium is Jupiter. Seriously, no joke. This is a crisis.
This seems like a Simon-Ehrlich wager case. We don't know of an immediate way to stop the crisis, but does that mean we really will run out of helium before someone discovers a better method of production?
I am not an economist and I'm not going to bet $10k on it or anything, but I think it's reasonable to expect something to change the situation.
There is no method of production. None, zero, zilch.
Unless you mean, say, production of ionizing alpha radiation, capture and containment, in which case you're using up another scarce resource of radioactive source products, generating far more radioactive waste then existing dirty nuclear plants, all for an amount of helium that you need a laboratory to measure.
Or maybe you mean by fusion? In which case you'd need a fusion reaction which yields stable helium isotopes which can be extracted without including radioactive byproducts. The difficulties here make interplanetary trade seem like nothing.
Economics is not a magic bullet. You actually need viable choices first, which we don't have here.
As far as I can tell, all natural gas resources has a percentage of Helium. Since we won't be running out of natural gas anytime soon, we won't be running out of extractable Helium. It just isn't extracted right now because the US is dumping their stockpile. By 2015 this should be done, prices should spike because production was stopped and will take some time to restart, and then it'll go back to "normal".
We could theoretically harvest the solar wind for alpha radiation. It will be much more efficient near mercury and you could use all that energy to vaporize rock and climb the gravity well with the cargo.
